Friday Links: Myth Week To Set Up Myth Month Edition
“I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided…And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.” - Anne Carson 'Autobiography of Red'
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with “Echolation” by Nova Wang making even more monsters in our literary Nostromo.
We begin by pouring one out for Small Press Distribution. I’m traveling this week and haven’t been able to look into what happened, so all I know is this is a huge bummer. My heart goes out to all the presses trying to figure out what to do.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week: like said, I’m traveling this week, and I think I’m gonna go longer on what it is about these two books on Wednesday. This is myth week, though, and these are two special versions of myths. These books take our most ancient texts and make them feel new and alive and surprising and immediate. Not only that, they’re short! Shoutout Statler and Waldorf. I’m talking, of course, about Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley.
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson: 14 years after I first read it, this book remains a North Star for me. If you’re unfamiliar, Stesichoros was a poet “born after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” He composed an epic poem about a red winged monster named Geryon who lives on an island with his red cattle and little red dog and one day Herakles comes and kills him. We only have fragments of The Geryoneis surviving today, so naturally, Anne Carson wrote a novel in verse around the surviving fragments (which she translated), updating the characters to be gay teenagers in the 90s.
This book is a master class in smooth, breezy-yet-weighty writing that twists your expectations and takes the top of your head off or whatever Emily Dickinson wanted. Amazingly, Carson makes beautiful a pretty cliched plot: Geryon is an angsty teenager who studies philosophy and takes up photography after his high school boyfriend dumps him. Embarrassing. This novel’s plot is a mid-2000s Juno/Garden State bildungsroman-for-people-who-got-into-The-Shins-before-everyone-else, except it’s steeped in ancient epics and written like Dickinson did mushrooms with Frank O’Hara. In other words, this book rips, dudes.
Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley: I wish I could say what it was that initially drew me to Beowulf. Because I’ve always been drawn to it. The name feels great in the mouth when you say it, yes. It is objectively hilarious that this vaunted, “courtly” (Tolkien), important poem is just a bunch of dudes talking about cool shit they did until a monster attacks and one of them kills it, repeat three times, guitar solo outro. My homie Devon went to a school where they had to do “declamations,” this weirdo private school thing where they had to say passages from books out loud but like, in front of people and from memory. Sounds awful to have to do or sit through, but Devon always did his from Beowulf, and would talk about how rad it was, so I was primed. I also read it at a time when I was pretty into Lord of the Rings, so.
By 2020, though, my Beowulf fandom, while real, was mostly a bit. My translator-unremembered-six-dollar-Barnes&Noble edition lived at my parents’ house, and who knows when I’d ask them to ship it north? Probably at some point, given my Red fandom, but who knows. Then, thank Hwaet (you don’t know whether I’m using that word correctly or not), Maria Dahvana Headley kicked the doors open with combat boots and yelled “bro, you thought Beowulf was about bros? Bro, you have no idea, bro.” This translation rules. Not to mention the semi-radical politics (of a poem fueled by testosterone and the cultural belief that the Romans smelled too good). Did you know the dragon at the end was cursed to become a dragon because he buried his treasure? Can you, in 2024, even fathom a poem that features so much generosity and sharing is associated with the British? And again—the aliveness of this translation, the eminent readability. When my kid was 20 months old (or something), I read this translation to him, and he let me go for like two and a half pages. Massive! Read this book.
Also I like to watch The Dollop’s “bro court” bit and imagine them saying hwaet.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? It’s Good Friday—the mythmaking that went into equating Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross with that of the lambs being sacrificed for Passover with a pretty impressive more—how bout my favorite Easter song?
Missed Tuesday’s The Line Break / Of Poetry crossover podcast? It’s cool, we get it. Hey, you’re busy. Here’s a link to Apple, here’s a link to Spotify, here’s a link to Soundcloud.
Hey, there was some terrible news outta Maryland this week. As someone who loves Maryland (real ones know Mrs. Shipwrecked Sailor was born in Baltimore, almost no one remembers I was too), I vote we start with something from a while ago. This look from “WP BrandStudio” (?) in The Washington Post about how the eastern shore of Maryland came to be the birthplace of many Black revolutionaries—from abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Civil Rights hero Gloria Dandridge Richardson—is fascinating. I don’t, like, gun-to-my-head believe certain places have magic to them, but if you’ve read VINE, you know I don’t not believe that. You also know, as a knower of things, that yr friendly neighborhood shipwrecked sailor’s reading ears perked up at the mention of waterways being mental and physical conduits to freedom.
On to the bad news from Maryland—what to say about a container ship running into a bridge and the bridge collapsing? It’s one of those monumentally awful things where all you can say is how awful it is (social media was awash in conspiracy theories). Here’s what I will link to: Baltimore Banner was on this story early, and they focused on the actual people, you know, the workers and bystanders actually affected by this. Clara Longa de Freitas, Hallie Miller, and Daniel Zawodny had this look at the victims and survivors, particularly those from Baltimore’s growing immigrant community. What a loss.
Staying in the negative feelings, see if you can get through three paragraphs of this deep dive on Boeing’s deep dive from Maureen Tkacik in The American Prospect without rage-quitting. This gets further into Swampy, the Quality Assurance guy allegedlyallegedlyallegedly
murdered by Boeing in a hotel roomfound dead in a hotel room that I linked to last week. Read this piece, and know that if you are good at your job, the guys who make 10 times more than you could dream of want to fire you, and reflect on how capitalism is best.On to something beautiful and hopeful! I really do want you to actually read the articles I link to here, but I get that you’re busy. That said, actually read this piece from Mere Takoko in Atmos on the He Whakaputanga Moana, or Declaration for the Ocean, a Māori-led initiative aimed at getting the UN to give a shit about ecology. Combining Indigenous Knowledge and scientific tradition, the He Whakaputanga Moana involves a number of things, including granting legal personhood to whales. I think this is a good thing, and reading this made me feel both hopeful and less like Corporate Triumph Until The Heat Death of The Planet is inevitable.
Shall we end on something wonderful? It’s myth week, and the Deep Sea is a place that invites a lot of myth-making. What, you think I’ve actually been in a shipwreck? I have been a sailor, though. Anyway, I was unfamiliar with neal.fun before today, and I’m still getting acquainted, but it seems like Neal would like to be identified as “a dude who made a fun website,” and here’s his page simulating the deep sea. Click over and start scrolling down. It’s especially fun on your phone. Isn’t that nuts? I know, right? I didn’t realize that one was that far down, either. Oh yeah, my sense of distance is not what I thought it was. Hey, wanna go re-read Our Wives Under The Sea?
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you have labors to complete?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Remember: the men in Beowulf are striving for retirement in a world where none exists (or however Maria phrases it, my copy is currently 500 miles away). The powers that be want you, service worker, to never even be able to retire. Not me, though. I’m cheering for you. I cannot, unfortunately, be the Beowulf to our shared Grendel (capitalism).
Sorry you got an email,
Chris